Download or read book Russia s Foreign Trade and Economic Expansion in the Seventeenth Century written by J. T. Kotilaine and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 665 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work is the first comprehensive assessment of Russia's foreign trade flows and economic growth in the seventeenth century. By demonstrating the growing openness of the economy, it reveals a key element in Russia's rise to great power status.

Download or read book The Elusive Empire written by Matthew P. Romaniello and published by University of Wisconsin Pres. This book was released on 2012-01-30 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1552, Muscovite Russia conquered the city of Kazan on the Volga River. It was the first Orthodox Christian victory against Islam since the fall of Constantinople, a turning point that, over the next four years, would complete Moscow’s control over the river. This conquest provided a direct trade route with the Middle East and would transform Muscovy into a global power. As Matthew Romaniello shows, however, learning to manage the conquered lands and peoples would take decades. Russia did not succeed in empire-building because of its strength, leadership, or even the weakness of its neighbors, Romaniello contends; it succeeded by managing its failures. Faced with the difficulty of assimilating culturally and religiously alien peoples across thousands of miles, the Russian state was forced to compromise in ways that, for a time, permitted local elites of diverse backgrounds to share in governance and to preserve a measure of autonomy. Conscious manipulation of political and religious language proved more vital than sheer military might. For early modern Russia, empire was still elusive—an aspiration to political, economic, and military control challenged by continuing resistance, mismanagement, and tenuous influence over vast expanses of territory.

Download or read book Cultivated Power written by Elizabeth Hyde and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2005-03-07 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cultivated Power explores the collection, cultivation, and display of flowers in early modern France at the historical moment when flowering plants, many of which were becoming known in Europe for the first time, piqued the curiosity of European gardeners and botanists, merchants and ministers, dukes and kings. Elizabeth Hyde reveals how flowers became uniquely capable of revealing the curiosity, reason, and taste of those elite men who engaged in their cultivation. The cultural and increasingly political value of such qualities was not lost on royal panegyrists, who seized upon the new meanings of flowers in celebrating the glory of Louis XIV. Using previously unexplored archival sources, Hyde recovers the extent of floral plantations in the gardens of Versailles and the sophisticated system of nurseries created to fulfill the demands of the king's gardeners. She further examines how the successful cultivation of those flowers made it possible for Louis XIV to demonstrate that his reign was a golden era surpassing even that of antiquity. Cultivated Power expands our knowledge of flowers in European history beyond the Dutch tulip mania, and restores our understanding of the importance of flowers in the French classical garden. The book also develops a fuller perspective on the roles of gender, rank, and material goods in the age of the baroque. Using flowers to analyze the movement of culture in early modern society, Cultivated Power ultimately highlights the influence of curious florists on the taste of the king, and the extension of the cultural into the realm of the political.

Download or read book The Science of Describing written by Brian W. Ogilvie and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-09-15 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Out of the diverse traditions of medical humanism, classical philology, and natural philosophy, Renaissance naturalists created a new science devoted to discovering and describing plants and animals. Drawing on published natural histories, manuscript correspondence, garden plans, travelogues, watercolors, and drawings, The Science of Describing reconstructs the evolution of this discipline of description through four generations of naturalists. In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, naturalists focused on understanding ancient and medieval descriptions of the natural world, but by the mid-sixteenth century naturalists turned toward distinguishing and cataloguing new plant and animal species. To do so, they developed new techniques of observing and recording, created botanical gardens and herbaria, and exchanged correspondence and specimens within an international community. By the early seventeenth century, naturalists began the daunting task of sorting through the wealth of information they had accumulated, putting a new emphasis on taxonomy and classification. Illustrated with woodcuts, engravings, and photographs, The Science of Describing is the first broad interpretation of Renaissance natural history in more than a generation and will appeal widely to an interdisciplinary audience.

Download or read book Russia s Steppe Frontier written by Michael Khodarkovsky and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2004-12-15 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on sources and archival materials in Russian and Turkic languages, Russia's Steppe Frontier presents a complex picture of the encounter between indigenous peoples and the Russians. It is an original and invaluable resource for understanding Russia's imperial experience. Michael Khodarkovsky is Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago.

Download or read book Russian Empire written by Jane Burbank and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2007-08-08 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Perspectives on the strategies of imperial rule pursued by rulers, officials, scholars, and subjects of the Russian empire. This book explores the connections between Russia's expansion over vast territories occupied by people of many ethnicities, religions, and political experiences and the evolution of imperial administration and vision.

Download or read book Stalinist Science written by Nikolai Krementsov and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1996-11-25 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some scholars have viewed the Soviet state and science as two monolithic entities--with bureaucrats as oppressors, and scientists as defenders of intellectual autonomy. Based on previously unknown documents from the archives of state and Communist Party agencies and of numerous scientific institutions, Stalinist Science shows that this picture is oversimplified. Even the reinstated Science Department within the Central Committee was staffed by a leading geneticist and others sympathetic to conventional science. In fact, a symbiosis of state bureaucrats and scientists established a much more terrifying system of control over the scientific community than any critic of Soviet totalitarianism had feared. Some scientists, on the other hand, developed more elaborate devices to avoid and exploit this control system than any advocate of academic freedom could have reasonably hoped. Nikolai Krementsov argues that the model of Stalinist science, already taking hold during the thirties, was reversed by the need for inter-Allied cooperation during World War II. Science, as a tool for winning the war and as a diplomatic and propaganda instrument, began to enjoy higher status, better funding, and relative autonomy. Even the reinstated Science Department within the Central Committee was staffed by a leading geneticist and others sympathetic to conventional science. However, the onset of the Cold War led to a campaign for eliminating such servility to the West. Then the Western links that had benefited genetics and other sciences during the war and through 1946 became a liability, and were used by Lysenko and others to turn back to the repressive past and to delegitimate whole research directions.

Download or read book Imperial Boundaries written by Brian J. Boeck and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-10-01 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imperial Boundaries is a study of imperial expansion and local transformation on Russia's Don Steppe frontier during the age of Peter the Great. Brian Boeck connects the rivalry of the Russian and Ottoman empires in the northern Black Sea basin to the social history of the Don Cossacks, who were transformed from an open, democratic, multiethnic, male fraternity dedicated to frontier raiding into a closed, ethnic community devoted to defending and advancing the boundaries of the Russian state. He shows how by promoting border patrol, migration control, bureaucratic regulation of cross-border contacts and deportation of dissidents, Peter I destroyed the world of the old steppe and created a new imperial Cossack order in its place. In examining this transformation, Imperial Boundaries addresses key historical issues of imperial expansion, the delegitimization of non-state violence, the construction of borders, and the encroaching boundaries of state authority in the lives of local communities.

Download or read book Visible Empire written by Daniela Bleichmar and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-10-08 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1777 and 1816, botanical expeditions crisscrossed the vast Spanish empire in an ambitious project to survey the flora of much of the Americas, the Caribbean, and the Philippines. While these voyages produced written texts and compiled collections of specimens, they dedicated an overwhelming proportion of their resources and energy to the creation of visual materials. European and American naturalists and artists collaborated to manufacture a staggering total of more than 12,000 botanical illustrations. Yet these images have remained largely overlooked—until now. In this lavishly illustrated volume, Daniela Bleichmar gives this archive its due, finding in these botanical images a window into the worlds of Enlightenment science, visual culture, and empire. Through innovative interdisciplinary scholarship that bridges the histories of science, visual culture, and the Hispanic world, Bleichmar uses these images to trace two related histories: the little-known history of scientific expeditions in the Hispanic Enlightenment and the history of visual evidence in both science and administration in the early modern Spanish empire. As Bleichmar shows, in the Spanish empire visual epistemology operated not only in scientific contexts but also as part of an imperial apparatus that had a long-established tradition of deploying visual evidence for administrative purposes.

Download or read book Desperate Magic written by Valerie A. Kivelson and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-15 with total page 539 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the courtrooms of seventeenth-century Russia, the great majority of those accused of witchcraft were male, in sharp contrast to the profile of accused witches across Catholic and Protestant Europe in the same period. While European courts targeted and executed overwhelmingly female suspects, often on charges of compacting with the devil, the tsars' courts vigorously pursued men and some women accused of practicing more down-to-earth magic, using poetic spells and home-grown potions. Instead of Satanism or heresy, the primary concern in witchcraft testimony in Russia involved efforts to use magic to subvert, mitigate, or avenge the harsh conditions of patriarchy, serfdom, and social hierarchy.Broadly comparative and richly illustrated with color plates, Desperate Magic places the trials of witches in the context of early modern Russian law, religion, and society. Piecing together evidence from trial records to illuminate some of the central puzzles of Muscovite history, Kivelson explores the interplay among the testimony of accusers, the leading questions of the interrogators, and the confessions of the accused. Assembled, they create a picture of a shared moral vision of the world that crossed social divides. Because of the routine use of torture in extracting and shaping confessions, Kivelson addresses methodological and ideological questions about the Muscovite courts' equation of pain and truth, questions with continuing resonance in the world today. Within a moral economy that paired unquestioned hierarchical inequities with expectations of reciprocity, magic and suspicions of magic emerged where those expectations were most egregiously violated.Witchcraft in Russia surfaces as one of the ways that oppression was contested by ordinary people scrambling to survive in a fiercely inequitable world. Masters and slaves, husbands and wives, and officers and soldiers alike believed there should be limits to exploitation and saw magic deployed at the junctures where hierarchical order veered into violent excess.

Download or read book The Petrine Revolution in Russian Culture written by James Cracraft and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2004-07-30 with total page 588 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The reforms initiated by Peter the Great transformed Russia not only into a European power, but into a European culture - a shift, argues James Cracraft, that was nothing less than revolutionary. Cracraft now turns his attention to the changes that occurred in Russian verbal culture.

Download or read book Empire of Extinction written by Ryan Tucker Jones and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Empire of Extinction examines the environmental catastrophe resulting from Russia's expansion into the North Pacific, causing Russians and other Europeans to recognize the threat of species extinction for the first time. This book demonstrates the importance of the North Pacific both for the Russian empire and for global environmental history.

Download or read book The Bathhouse at Midnight written by William Francis Ryan and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 1999-01-01 with total page 518 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The title of this book refers to the classic time and place for magic, witchcraft, and divination in Russia. The Bathhouse at Midnight, by one of the world's foremost experts on the subject, surveys all forms of magic, both learned and popular, in Russia from the fifth to the eighteenth century. While no book on the subject could be exhaustive, The Bathhouse at Midnight does describe and assess all the literary sources of magic, witchcraft, astrology, alchemy, and divination from Kiev Rus and Imperial Russia, and to some extent Ukraine and Belorussia. Where possible, Ryan identifies the sources of the texts (usually Greek, Arabic, or West European) and makes parallels to other cultures, ranging from classical antiquity to Finnic. He finds that Russia shares most of its magic and divination with the rest of Europe. Subjects covered include the Evil Eye, the Number of the Beast, omens, dreams, talismans and amulets, plants, gemstones, and other materials thought to possess magic properties. The first chapter gives a historical overview, and the final chapter summarizes the political, religious, and legal aspects of the history of magic in Russia. The author also provides translations of some key texts. The Bathhouse at Midnight will be invaluable for anyone&—student, teacher, or general reader&—with an interest in Russia, magic, or the occult. It is unique in its field and is set to become the definitive study of Russian magic.

Download or read book Science in Russian Culture 1861 1917 written by Alexander Vucinich and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1970 with total page 602 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Stanford University Press classic.

Download or read book Visions of Empire written by David Philip Miller and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-07-21 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richly illustrated 1996 collection on how Pacific plants and peoples were depicted by European explorers.

Download or read book Matters of Exchange written by Harold John Cook and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents evidence that Dutch commerce, not religion, inspired the rise of science in the 16th and 17th centuries. Scrutinises many historical documents relating to the study of medicine and natural history during this era, showing direct links between commerce and trade, and the flourishing of scientific investigation.

Download or read book The Origins of Museums written by Oliver Impey and published by Ashmolean Museum Oxford. This book was released on 2017-06 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Origins of Museums is an extensive account of the first great collections in late sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe. The collections, then called 'cabinets of curiosities', were the beginnings of museums as we now know them. The discovery of the New World saw a huge influx of exotic and rare exhibits arrive in from distant lands. These discoveries revolutionised the European view of the wider world. Scholars from all over the globe describe in thirty- three essays the achievements of numerous significant collectors, the range of material gathered and the impact these collections had on Late Renaissance society. With a comprehensive bibliography, the papers provide expert insight into this fascinating period of collecting history, a generally neglected subject.--Amazon.com